Thanks Barry, and sorry to see it go. It's been threatening to disappear intermittently for a while now.

I'm doubting that the Bing tools will provide much competitive intelligence. For tools that had depended on Yahoo data, the Yahoo Search Blog notes....

Will the Site Explorer APIs be shut down?

The APIs were scheduled to be shut down at the end of last year, but the timeframe has been extended for the YDN Site Explorer API up until September 15, 2011.

The blog post also says...

Although the organic results will be powered by Microsoft Search platforms, Yahoo! will continue to innovate on the search experience beyond the services delivered by Microsoft. In order to provide Yahoo! users with an amazing search experience, our slurp crawlers may continue to selectively crawl websites to help support these efforts.

I will be sad to see this tool go, and I have used it for many years to check backlinks of sites that I have been working on and those of competitors. Will Bing's webmaster tools allow you to view competitor backlinks?

I have been using Open Site Explorer recently (works best with and SEOMoz Pro subscription) so I will continue to use that.

It WAS a great tool, I agree Randle, but it made no money for Yahoo/Bing and so they'd prefer to ferry us off to their 'product'.

Google's backlink tool is completely inadequate for most users, I agree again Randle, they intentionally do not show you most of what you want to know.

There are some extremely solid other sources however, your favorite SEO specialist site likely has one (some mentioned above). My concern is that when a company earns it's living by having more data than the next guy, a la Google/Bing etc, they will not want you to have/get the data elsewhere.

Data is what makes the search engines valuable, they'll notice when you can bypass them to get it.

I have been using Open Site Explorer recently (works best with and SEOMoz Pro subscription) so I will continue to use that.

I just had a look, their free version seems to work well enough for my purposes.

the tool isn't just a good/great tool. It's also a perfect example of how to get quality backlinks. All the people that suggest you can't get links in competitive industries like SEO? Or you can't get links from your competitors? There's a public example right there of how to do it.

Today a domain in one of my niches was offered to me. Actually a niche of a niche in a bigger niche. So I checked the back links in Yahoo SE - 155; in SEOMoz OSE - 46. A few percent here or there is understandable but this difference is HUGE!

I find that YSE tends to only display certain types of backlinks and do not display others. Over the time I managed to secure some good contextual backlinks from high-authority publications such as newspapers, magazines, BUT rarely find them in the list of backlinks exported from YSE.

It is a really sad news, its a great tool and such a shame that they have to take it down, i can totally see this shall leave devastating impact on results.

In a recent PR update a network of directories attained millions of back links, most of the were hacked and placed on high PR sites, but people figured out using siteexplorer, now its going to blind fold people and you cannot see if the place you are submitting your link into is good enough.

This is a good news for Seomoz and Majestic and other similar tools, i will have to buy subscriptions again.

Cruxo & vrottenstein:: Are you sure you are applying proper filters? there are search filters on top right section.

I also doubt that there will be an equivalent implementation by Bing, we will see. They were already some rumors about the close down of YSE and I think yahoo didnīt work round to enhance it. Nevertheless, Yahoo Site Explorer is one of the few free seo tools I really appreciate.